Breadcrumbs

Em

The blog’s been a bit quiet for the past couple of months (actually silent). So far the holidays haven’t been a chance to relax, but overall they’ve been pretty good fun.

The last two weeks of term after exams were finished were filled with plans with my friends for pure fun, but in reality were filled with evil estate agents and looking at house after house (if we didn’t find anywhere we planned to camp out in the basement of Charing Cross Hospital with the vampire who lives there – long story…) We eventually found a house – really close to Charing Cross campus, which is where a lot of our 2nd year teaching will be.

So much for blogging a bit over the past couple of weeks to keep me sane. Life has consisted of revise, eat, sleep, repeat for the past couple of weeks, and I think I may have gone (more) crazy. I’m still slightly in shock, both that exams are over and I can stop revising, and that I’ve finished my first year. Things are starting to wind down now – most subjects have finished exams, and although some still have projects to finish, everyone’s taking time to relax a bit. Just went down to the kitchen to get some lunch, and currently it’s pancakes and loud music.

The blog’s been a bit quiet lately – the opposite of everything else in my life. I can’t believe it’s been over two months – it feels more like two minutes.

Since then, ICSM will have made all their offers to potential Freshers. So, to all of you who received offers…. CONGRATULATIONS! Welcome to the best medical school on the planet (I’m not at all biased…)

For those of you who didn’t, don’t give up. I didn’t get into med school first time round, so I took a gap year and worked as a healthcare assistant.

So much for getting up at 8.30. I slept for about eleven hours and woke up at 11.30 … oops …

Might need to make my alarm louder before my exam on Tuesday. And get all my friends to ring me to make sure I’m up.

Besides that it’s been a really good day (not that sleep wasn’t good … sleep is always very very good 🙂 ) I sort of made up for it this afternoon by getting lots of Society & Health/Epidemiology revision done, so feeling ever so slightly better about the exam on Tuesday.

Met up with Katherine at Snog at 5 for a ‘revision break’…

…which turned out to not be a break, because I couldn’t be bothered to do any more revision when I got back.

I had a much needed lie-in this morning – so much for my plans to get up early to work in the library. But I’m entirely in agreement with the theory that you can’t live with all work and no play/sleep (although slightly regretting the work I could’ve done but didn’t…) After I eventually got up, I met my big brother Richard at Old Spitalfields Market – we had lunch at Giraffe (yum!) and then had a wander round – Rich was really impressed with being dragged to look at clothes and jewellery… But I’m happy because I got a cute t-shirt 🙂

Afterwards we went over to the Museum of London to see the Sherlock Holmes exhibition – it was really good.

I didn’t have any lectures yesterday, which I don’t think was coincidental – Wednesday was Varsity so I doubt many would have shown up if we’d had lectures. I didn’t end up going to bed early on Wednesday night, but made up for it by getting up late on Thursday morning and then procrastinated for a couple of hours … and then made a cake … so I wasn’t being entirely unproductive, but it wasn’t the type of productivity I’d been planning on. I eventually made it to the library a bit after 3pm – so much for having a ‘library day.’ Still, I got a bit of PBL done, then met my Respiratory-Lecturer-Personal-Tutor for a couple of hours to go over some resp stuff that I missed/don’t understand – it now makes much more sense!

I’m sure it’s easier to get out of bed when it’s sunny, so I actually made it to lectures on time today. And I even had time to take some (sunny) photos of my walk to uni to show y’all.

First lecture was on something. Probably COPD or asthma, because that’s what Resp seems to be mostly about…. Okay, I just checked, it was actually on ‘Sensory Aspects of Respiratory Disease’ i.e. symptoms. I remember now (vaguely…)

Since suffering through both Religious Studies and Geography lessons every Tuesday when I was in year 7, it’s been my least favourite day of the week. The trouble with Tuesday is it’s not Monday (hence not relaxed after the weekend), but it’s still so long to the weekend.

At least it wasn’t raining this morning. I think the heating in halls has been turned down now that it’s March, but after lovely sunshine last week, we seem to have reverted back to winter. My room in halls is fairly big, so takes a lot of warming up; in the mornings at the moment it is FREEZING.

0100h: Went to bed. Really have no idea why I was up ‘til then, productivity ceased at about 9pm and I did nothing for the next four hours.

0800h: Alarm went off. I love bed. I hate alarm. Bed won.

0815h: Flolloped* out of bed. Then didn’t move for about 5 minutes whilst trying to come to terms with having moved from a supine to a standing position. (Had a lecture on this the other week – when we stand blood goes from the head to the legs because of gravity, but the sympathetic nervous system does some stuff to counteract it – unless it doesn’t, in which case you faint.)

Uni is intense. Not exactly unexpected – Medicine, Imperial – it was always going to be. It’s not just the workload (which has skyrocketed in the past couple of weeks). It’s all of it.

At the beginning of the year, a lot of students in older years told me that out of work, sleep and a social life, I could only choose two. At first I ignored this, convinced I’d be perfectly able to manage all of them. Recently I’ve come to realise that they were right – if I want time for all three I’ll have to learn to juggle (metaphorically).